When an economic recession in the colonies followed the end of the French and Indian War, many Americans began to reassess the nature of their relationship with Britain. In this excerpt, historian T. H. Breen details the new concerns of colonists after 1763.

“The private pleasures associated with consuming imported manufactures now raised disconcerting issues directly connected to a growing level of colonial indebtedness, to a constant drain of hard currency to the mother country to pay for an ever increasing volume of goods, to the enforcement of the Navigation Acts, which prohibited British colonists from entering foreign markets, and to a rising number of bankruptcies.”